Comment by pinnochio
5 hours ago
There's a lot of jeering, I suspect at the headline more than anything, but having documented research can be helpful in changing management behavior. The changes in employee behavior documented here are not ones that managers would easily connect to their past behavior, such as a late birthday recognition.
When you train a dog, you have to give a reward very soon after the desired behavior, otherwise the dog won't associate the reward with the behavior. Likewise, a manager is not going to associate a slight towards an employee with an increase in absenteeism or lower productivity that happens days and weeks later.
Please don't compare employee relationships to dog training. I've had a few encounters with poor managers (or potential managers) who wanted to treat me like a dog.
I turned heel and ran in those cases. It's a bad analogy for managing people and should not be perpetuated.
> When you train a dog, you have to give a reward very soon after the desired behavior, otherwise the dog won't associate the reward with the behavior
Regarding dog training, one can use a placeholder for the reward. This is useful, for example, if you want to reward a dolphin jumping through a hula, because you will not be able to give the reward at that moment, but for example, you can say "yes!" or use a clicker at that moment, and give the reward later, and it will be clear what caused it.
For anyone training any animal, I recommend the book: Don't Shoot the Dog! The New Art of Teaching and Training by Karen Pryor (not affiliated in any way)
Have we got to the point where we need an article telling us that slighting people doesn't help their motivation? Perhaps the answer is yes when we also compare a worker's motivation to a dog's motivation seemingly without irony.
> When you train a dog, you have to give a reward very soon after the desired behavior, otherwise the dog won't associate the reward with the behavior. Likewise, a manager is not going to associate a slight towards an employee with an increase in absenteeism or lower productivity that happens days and weeks later.
Note that GP is comparing the _managers_ motivation to a dog’s motivation, not the worker. It’s about a delayed feedback loop to the manager, who won’t connect the punishment (lower productivity) with the bad behavior (slighting the employee).
1 reply →
Leadership, authority, command, etc. have many forms that don't necessarily match up with what is effective or how people would like to be treated as a subordinate. Assuming that managers know better than to be assholes to their employees (or vice-versa) is a huge and very wrong assumption. Social skills also benefit from training and practice like anything else. Many people have never seen or experienced professional and competent management, so they have no example to follow or model to emulate.
Having a documented effect and effect size puts this in terms that can change manager behavior, even a somewhat callous one, because they can see how it affects their own professional goals.
Btw, the comparison was between the dog and manager, and about the association of cause and effect. Maybe you should try to read more carefully and charitably in the future.
3 replies →
Given that many organizations literally refer to their employees as “Resource Units” literally abstracting away their humanity I’m going to say… yes. We are at that point (and have been for quite some time).
2 replies →
The top-level comment was being ironic. To explain the joke, the employees are withholding the reward of hard work from the employer because the employer behaved badly (by slighting them in some way).
Indeed, they're not animals--we don't want them demanding hay https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/2002-08-05
People are animals like any other. That’s not a slight. Managers respond to incentives much like dogs do too, and so do execs, and board members, and every human.
I think you responded to the wrong post. I did not suggest or made any of these comparisons or comments. I simply recommended a book about training dogs or other animals, and the clicker method.
I thought this was more about training your manager...
Technically I believe the dog is the manager in this metaphor.
The length of time between behaviour and reward/punishment is too great. So to train your manager you need to go home straight away.
Probably, which is unfortunate. I have personally seen a VP be shocked that morale tanked after a large layoff. I think he said “you would think they would be happy they still have jobs”. Lots of sociopaths in the C-Suite.
> Have we got to the point where we need an article telling us that slighting people doesn't help their motivation?
American culture is unfortunately permeated with examples, and habits, and expectations around punishing the behaviors you'd want to see. I see subtle things like that all the time. So while I doubt anyone who stopped to actually think about the concrete implications of their behavior, more specifically their unconscious habits; wouldn't be able to describe how insulting people, or really, how discouraging people is likely to have a negative outcome. The catch being, most people don't stop to consider anything. Thoes who do, are exceptionally rare.
As an example, someone posted a comment providing context, and encouraging people to be curious and grow their skill set with techniques that will help them with dogs, (and yes, these do translate to humans as well.)
Which invited a negative comment from you attacking people who aren't perfect every single moment of every single day, who might benefit from a reminder that how they treat others matters. Also indirectly attacking the person you replied to.
(See what I mean about the culture of punishing the behavior, you want to see? Or did you intend to discourage curiosity?)
> Perhaps the answer is yes when we also compare a worker's motivation to a dog's motivation seemingly without irony.
You can train a human using the exact same skills you use to train a dog. Just because humans are also, in addition to those able to do a lot more, and learn in an astronomically larger set of ways, doesn't exclude the techniques that work best with dogs. You forget this at your own peril. I.e. if the way you behave wouldn't encourage the behavior you want from a dog well, it sure as hell wont encourage the behavior from a human. All humans, including you, are not that special, get over yourself. rhetorically speaking
2 replies →
I thought it was interesting. Going through something like this myself right now, I learned that I don't lose motivation to do the work. I gain a motivation to cut the person out of the picture.
We definitely do. How else are the LLMs that are going to replace managers will learn that? /s
[flagged]
1 reply →
I suppose the employee-getting-revenge-on-manager equivalent would be playing some loud, annoying sound immediately after the slight, and then engaging in absenteeism and cutting work early later on.
[flagged]
1 reply →
> late birthday recognition.
if someone is going to feel slighted and similar things add up to them working less, they probably are not a great colleague to begin with.
What matters more are: assignment to rewarding work, get paid top dollar, not be bored, get recognition for success, coaching on career growth, given leeway to make mistakes, not overlooked for promotion, etc.
Now, as a people manager, if you're not steering those kinds of things, you are not a great manager and you should be replaced with someone who does those things.
The example was a birthday card, but the mechanism is more important: the manager disregarded a policy in a way that was specifically disrespectful to a specific employee.
People don’t care about the birthday card. They care when the manager does something nice for everyone but them. Nobody cares about a pizza party, they care that the manager didn’t think to save any pizza for the team that had to do an emergency call out to a client site during lunch.
Being primarily interested in money and career advancement would also make you not a great colleague in many people’s eyes. It’s rather subjective.
Whether people like to admit it or not, very rarely do people work for anything but money and career advancement. You can claim you work for passion, the love of the game or whatever 100 other reasons people tend to give out. All it takes is 2 years of no raises and a couple of promotions for colleagues for you to start not wanting to work for whatever reason you convinced yourself you were working for.
People are emotional and react in unexpected ways to even the smallest perceived slights, myself included.
A late birthday recognition might not feel important, but if one already feels like management doesn't care about them? I can easily seeing that as a confirmation of it that causes resentment. I can also see it doing the same for any number of management related issues.
I can tell you personally that the action which most seriously affected my performance at a workplace was being denied a bereavement day because the official policy was to only allow one. I felt more than slighted and every single negative action taken afterwards by HR/management, no matter how small, caused me to resent them more.
> being denied a bereavement day because the official policy was to only allow one
I think when setting up policy like this you have two choices:
a) have a fixed number of days --> fair, objective
b) allow it to the manager to use their judgement --> variance across company
The former has the tradeoff that you experienced.
1 reply →
it also depends on whether everyone is treated equally, or whether some are treated worse or better than others.
A lot of this is already known.
If I find out that management is being adversarial to ICs (eg. not offering to pay 75th percentile salaries, giving crap equity offers) I've put pressure to let heads roll. Similarly, if I've seen ICs become adversarial (eg. quiet quitting, overemployed, ignoring brutally honest conversations to upskill, constantly undermining product roadmaps) I've often allowed heads to roll as well.
At least in the Bay Area, the "Netflix Model" has become the norm post-COVID - pay top dollar, but also be open to fire if interests do not align.
What I've noticed in my career as an IC and management is a lot of lower-mid level management are people who were promoted well beyond where their capabilities. To be brutally honest, the stereotypical snarky HNer who is promoted to Staff Eng with an option to become an EM is the worst hire in any organization.
> If I find out that management is being adversarial to ICs (eg. not offering to pay 75th percentile salaries
I find this funny because it suggests an equilibrium point where 75% of management must be adversarial by definition.
Adversarial is a loaded word. In my experience, the management I’d call most adversarial occurred at companies paying 80th to 90th percentile or higher. The attitude is that they’re paying employees enough that they need to shut up and put up with anything that comes their way. If you don’t like it, we have a list of qualified applicants who will gladly take your place in a heartbeat and won’t complain as much because those paychecks are larger than what they made at their last company.
> To be brutally honest, the stereotypical snarky HNer who is promoted to Staff Eng with an option to become an EM is the worst hire in any organization.
I think the trend where companies made Staff Eng into a pseudo-management role without reports was a mistake. It gets defended heavily by people who hold that role, but in the real world the Staff Eng people I’ve worked with who don’t really write code but float around and tell people what to do and how to do it become bad for an organization over time. It’s a trap because those people are often very valuable right after they’re promoted, but the roles where they become disconnected from writing code but retain the engineer title leads to a disconnectedness that flips toward counterproductive after a few years. It goes from having an experienced person coaching others to having someone with outdated and mostly abstract knowledge who gets to gatekeep everyone’s activities based on how things worked several years ago when they were still hands on.
> companies paying 80th to 90th percentile or higher. The attitude is that they’re paying employees enough that they need to shut up and put up with anything that comes their way. If you don’t like it, we have a list of qualified applicants who will gladly take your place in a heartbeat and won’t complain as much because those paychecks are larger than what they made at their last company
Well, yes in a way.
Criticism is expected and encouraged, but if it is done so while ignoring the 3 primary goals of a business:
1. Drive revenue growth
2. Expand TAM
3. Land strategic deals (not all customers are equal)
and is provided without a solution, you will be replaced. I don't care about prioritizing a bug fix or codebase refactor if the alternative means not being able to release feature X to help land Acme's mid 7 figure TCV deal.
The best Engineers I've worked with learnt how to merge valid engineering concerns with the top-line concerns mentioned above as well as being able to provide solutions. It's also how I was able to go from an IC to management.
If an employee thinks they know better, they can try to become a PM or start a competitor.
The bad experiences mentioned above really took off shortly before and during COVID, and this is why we are seeing the pendulum swing the opposite direction.
> I think the trend where companies made Staff Eng into a pseudo-management role without reports was a mistake. It gets defended heavily by people who hold that role, but in the real world the Staff Eng people I’ve worked with who don’t really write code but float around and tell people what to do and how to do it become bad for an organization over time.
I partially agree.
I think a Staff Eng role where it is someone who is deeply technical but helps align their team's delivery with other teams is extremely valuable (basically Staff+ as an architect role).
What I feel is the severe title inflation that arose during COVID turned "staff" into the new "senior", with too many people who floated into the role without aptitude.
[flagged]
Perhaps it may help to work on your social skills with more intent. People who often find themselves disrespected at work aren't always bad performers but they do tend to have large social blind spots they themselves aren't aware of.
More than anything my comment was pointing out that I've worked with a number of engineering managers who like to kiss their dogs on the mouth on Zoom calls.
Why do you jump to the conclusion of parent being the problem? Your comment implicitly accepts that people's social skills can be problematic, but you assume it isn't the manager?
Or maybe, quite a few managers need to work on their social skills. It is genuinely weird that the expectation of emotional and social management always falls on engineer in these debates. Maybe, just maybe, a manager with supposedly higher social skills should be able to manage relationships with engineers better.
Indeed. I've had a few of those. I also had a couple that were really good.
Dogs or managers?
1 reply →